Prologue: In the Beginning was Peter’s Word

Abstract

Things come to life in St. Petersburg. Ever since metal softened into flesh in The Bronze Horseman, Alexander Pushkin’s famous poema to Peter the Great’s new capital, the city has provided a literary space in which inanimate things spring into life. From statues to noses, overcoats to words, and even sounds and letters themselves, these objects take on flesh and stroll through the pages of literary Petersburg. Meanwhile, in mute contrast to these awakened objects, the city’s human occupants—the ostensible “heroes” of these tales—remain almost ostentatiously voiceless, silenced variously by madness, incoherence, or social position. What aspects of the city’s literary heritage produce this strange alchemy, this peculiar Petersburg condition in which matter passes into life, and life back into shadow? Of course, such ozhivlenie (vivification or “coming to life”) is hardly confined to Petersburg literature. The Pygmalion myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—in which the sculptor Pygmalion caresses, kisses, pleads, and finally prays into life the ivory figure he has sculpted—represents one particularly productive iteration of this phenomenon of divine animation. The Pygmalion motif has been retold and transformed countless times in the Western canon, from the Middle Ages through the modern age.1 A few of its most famous variations appear in the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in which Hermione appears to warm from stone back into flesh; in Shaw’s comic play Pygmalion,